Professor Matthew Bailes

Biography

Professor Matthew Bailes is an Australian research Council Laureate Fellow and the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGRav). He is a world leader in the discovery and timing of millisecond pulsars and has made pivotal contributions to the discovery of the Fast Radio Bursts – enigmatic millisecond-duration bursts of radio waves that strike the Earth many thousands of times per day and are of unknown origin.

Professor Bailes’ research mainly concerns developing instrumentation for time domain astrophysics and using it for pulsar and FRB discovery in conjunction with collaborators in Australia, Europe and the US. He is the Australian Champion of the Breakthrough Listen project with the Parkes 64m radio telescope. This project aimed to search (intelligently) for the existence of Extra-Terrestrial life with the Parkes 64m radio telescope in collaboration with the CSIRO and Berkeley. From 2017 he will lead the MeerTIME project that will use the new MeerKAT telescope to time radio pulsars as part of an international collaboration.

Professor Bailes founded the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne in 1998 and served as its Director for the first 12 years. His team developed a supercomputer for the 50 year-old Molonglo telescope to transform it into a pulsar timing and FRB discovery machine as part of the UTMOST project.